


Monstrosity

by cuddlesome



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Body Horror, Dark Luke, F/M, Lovecraftian, Mutation, Violence, Vomiting, canonverse-y with AU elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-24
Updated: 2017-11-24
Packaged: 2019-02-06 03:53:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,355
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12809046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cuddlesome/pseuds/cuddlesome
Summary: Rey is afraid, but not as afraid as Luke.





	Monstrosity

It’s growing.

 

Rey stares at the discolored patch of skin creeping up from beneath her arm wraps, feeling ill. It’s never done this before. She reaches up to touch it, only to end up clamping her hand over it when Luke appears from behind an outcropping of rocks.

 

She pulls the wraps a bit higher up as he watches from beneath his cowl. He looks suspicious, but then, he always looks like that. He watches her for a second longer, then continues on his way.

 

Rey exhales, suddenly aware she had been holding her breath, and decides to skip out on the lightsaber forms she had planned on doing that morning.

 

A pair of porgs follow her to the hut the caretakers are letting her live in, but she shooshes them out. She’s liable to scare them with her condition. Or worse, infect them.

 

She unwraps her right arm and peers at it. The pustules twinkle like stars. But uglier. Her skin shifts in hue and position in places. The crook of one elbow sometimes sinks into a dark void. Six year old Rey once stuck a finger into it before she became properly afraid of what she was becoming.

 

Now she just shifts her wraps up a little further and goes on pretending she doesn’t know that her body is transmogrifying into something inhuman.

 

Luke knows. He seems to know everything but never wants to do anything about it unless it concerns getting her to leave him alone.

 

At the campfire that night, he doesn’t offer her a bowl of food but instead sets it down by him and begins eating his own. Confused, wondering if it’s some sort of a test, Rey walks around the fire and reaches for the bowl.

 

Luke’s metal fingers clamp around the wrist of her misshapen arm. Rey’s heart contracts. She did something wrong. She upset him. What was she supposed to do? Was she meant to use the Force to get her food? Why—?

 

Luke’s other hand reaches up and pulls the top half of her arm wrap down in a single jerk. The shifting mass beneath gleams and flickers at him. Rey tries to cover it with her human hand. Luke lets her go. She stumbles back and sits down heavily back on the other side of the campfire. Shame and embarrassment and the tiniest bit of anger form a lump in her throat. She wishes Chewie had joined them tonight instead of staying alone in the _Falcon_ ; he might not have let Luke do that.

 

He shakes his head. “You thought that you could hide that from me?”

 

“Not you personally. From everyone.”

 

Luke gives her a long, hard look. “My father and my nephew both had their bodies consumed by the Force, as you do. Anakin Skywalker’s master cut his limbs off in an attempt to stop the spread.”

 

Rey takes this to be advice.

 

Later that night, when she’s alone, she turns on her lightsaber, lifts her arm, and holds the humming blade under her armpit. She squeezes her eyes shut. She counts to ten. She jerks the blade up.

 

The heat kisses her skin and a bit of hair fizzles but she doesn’t cut through.

 

“Coward,” she hisses at herself. “Do it. Do what it takes to survive.”

 

She can get a new arm after. A bionic one like Luke’s hand. It will be okay.

 

Rey doesn’t end up working up the guts to do it. She collapses onto her pallet with the lightsaber hilt in hand and falls asleep.

 

As she sleeps, she dreams, and in her dreams she sees someone she’d really rather not amidst the darkness.

 

Kylo Ren doesn’t so much as greet her before he takes off his wide belt. Immediately the form of his torso starts to shift and bulge beneath the cloth.

 

He unzips the gambeson, pulls each side away, and the stuff of nightmares comes spilling out.

 

His translucent skin is stretched tight over his guts. The rippling, swollen viscera looks like it belongs to three different species, none of them human. His skeleton is crunched into strange angles like balled up paper. Everything pulses and shifts in time, like a heartbeat. There’s something black and oozing in the left chamber of his deteriorated chest, but it isn’t a heart. If Rey looks at it too long she can see the galaxy and all the pain in it.

 

His human head sits atop it all like a doll’s transplanted onto the wrong body.

 

Rey turns away and bends over and retches. The bile stings in her nostrils to complement the tears in her eyes. The putrid vomit splashed on top of and around her boots is a favorable sight compared to him.

 

Kylo takes a step towards her. Rey jerks her head up and tries to focus on his face. That scar may as well be a pinprick now.

 

“Stay away from me.” He takes another step and she draws her lightsaber and points it at him. “I said stay away! I don’t want you infecting me any more than you already have.”

 

Kylo’s full lips curl, such a human gesture on an inhuman _thing_. “I haven’t infected you with anything. You were like this long before you met me, and you know it.”

 

“Not like that. Not like you.”

 

The lightsaber drops from her hand. It’s spasming and becoming something not-a-hand anymore.

 

“You will. It will only get worse. And then no one will accept you. Not my uncle, not your traitorous friend—” he leans in close, too close “—and not the family that left their freak of a daughter to suffer and die alone.”

 

Rey can feel every individual muscle in her body spasm as though it had just been sunk into a frozen lake. Then she feels more. Every nerve. Every cell.

 

She punches Kylo in the middle of his lurid torso with her malformed hand. She is rewarded only by a wet slurp as it sucks her in like a bog, melting their twisted bodies together. Any attempt to drag herself away only takes her in deeper. Kylo’s cheeks spilt as he smiles too widely for a moment, but the skin knits itself back together over his molars in a matter of seconds.

 

Her tears are acid down her face. “My family loved me. They were going to come back. They didn’t know about this.”

 

“Stop lying to yourself. I know what it’s like to be unloved.”

 

Rey shakes her head and tries to pull away from him again. Kylo strokes the pulsating skin on her wrist, then grabs hold of it. Inch by inch, he drags her arm out from between his organs until they’re separated. Then he takes the scintillating mess of tissue and boils her hand has become, leans down, and kisses it.

 

“You’re a monster,” she whispers.

 

He lays his scarred cheek against her hand. “What does that make you?”

 

Rey knows the nightmare had some grip on reality when she awakens to see that her entire arm had become the same ever-shifting mass that it had been while she was asleep. She shakes her head as she reaches for it numbly with her other hand still composed of human flesh.

 

The lightsaber lays forgotten on the floor. Rey only remembers it’s there when it flies through the air much in the same way it had on Starkiller Base. The difference is that instead of coming to her, it sails toward the doorway where it’s caught by a bionic hand.

 

“I see you couldn’t bring yourself to cut it off on your own,” he says. “I’m sorry. I’m not going to unleash another like my nephew on the galaxy.”

 

Luke’s figure is illuminated in a ghostly blue as he turns the lightsaber on. Rey shrinks back, groping for her staff in the dark even though she knows it will be useless. She can’t see his eyes from beneath his hood. Her mutated arm, curled against her chest, is numb.

 

Luke hesitates for a moment before he attacks Rey and it gives her some tiny shred of comfort.

**Author's Note:**

> Just a little something that I thought about after seeing the second trailer for The Last Jedi. I'm really fascinated by the idea of Luke being afraid of Rey because of her having raw power synonymous to Kylo and I can't wait to see it explored in the film (albeit in a less morbid way than here of course, haha).


End file.
